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When Zealots Attack

By Nick Bilton June 22, 2012 2:10 pmJune 22, 2012 2:10 pm

Fan Jun/Xinhua, via Associated Press

So far this year I’ve only been called an “idiot” on two occasions.

The first time was by my 6-year-old nephew, Luca, after I accidentally knocked an already-dangling baby tooth from his mouth while we were horsing around in the pool. (My actions were even reported to the tooth fairy.)

The second time was this week, when a group of fully grown adults declared on the Internet that I was an idiot, stupid, and, well other things I can’t possibly relate in a family newspaper.

Why? Well, I didn’t knock their baby teeth out, that’s for sure. Instead, I said something slightly negative about an Apple product.

After the Microsoft Surface announcement, I wrote a blog post that expressed the following: “The iPad, for all its glory, suffers from one very distinct flaw: It’s very difficult to use for creation. The keyboard on the screen, although pretty to look at, is abysmal for typing anything over 140 characters.”

As a journalist who writes in all shapes and sizes — tweets, blog posts, print features and books — I’ve tried on numerous occasions to rattle out narratives on my iPad, but I personally find it impractical at best.

This isn’t anything against touch screens. I absolutely love typing on my iPhone, where I can pummel my thumbs at the screen with the speed of Superman and the accuracy of an Olympic archer. But, for me, typing long form on the iPad is much more difficult. Maybe it’s a simple problem of the keyboard design on the iPad. There are no arrow buttons to quickly move up and down or to the side, when correcting text, as I do on a physical keyboard.

At first John Gruber of the blog Daring Fireball offered a valid and measured argument, noting that he has “seen people who type faster on an iPad than I type on a hardware keyboard.” But then some Apple fans quickly turned into an aggressive horde online in their quest to defend the most valuable company on the planet. Some responses left me scratching my head wondering what could drive someone to write vulgarities over an observation about typing on the iPad.

I love the iPad just as much as anyone else — likely more than most people. And I understand passion around products we love. I’ve always had a zeal for anything that requires a power source. But guys, these are products. They are products we buy, with our own money, from Apple — a company that makes a very hefty profit from those transactions.

And here I was, thinking that the days of calling people names on the Internet were all in the past. I guess that hopeful outlook makes me an idiot after all.